<aside> <img src="notion://custom_emoji/3b7b79b0-95af-4500-931c-e5c63e5df242/23ac6f79-9a33-80da-9908-007ae96e1d8b" alt="notion://custom_emoji/3b7b79b0-95af-4500-931c-e5c63e5df242/23ac6f79-9a33-80da-9908-007ae96e1d8b" width="40px" />
How Dean Shev transformed British Columbian survey data into 17 songs that capture the soul of our AI community
</aside>
You know that moment when someone completely redefines what you thought was possible? That happened to me… and 250 other people… when Dean Shev stepped onto our stage at the 20th Vancouver AI Community meetup.
Here's what I expected: another data visualization, maybe some charts, possibly a dashboard. What we got instead was something that made generative AI feel like it had found its soul.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAKcSPNCrdE
Dean dropped a fucking album on us.
Let me back up. Six months ago, my buddy Andrew Reid from Rival Technologies came to me with this wild idea. His company does market research for massive brands… Warner Brothers, Pepsi, you name it. They collect all this incredible human data, but then what? PowerPoint presentations. Bar charts. The most boring shit imaginable.
"There's gotta be something more we can do with this in the AI age," Andrew said.
So we launched the Vancouver AI Data Storytelling Hackathon. Real money: $2,500 per round, four rounds total. The deal was simple: we give you raw survey data from a thousand British Columbians about their hopes and fears around AI, and you tell us a story that isn't a goddamn PowerPoint.
We had no idea what we were unleashing.
By round three, we'd already seen some incredible projects. Proj Wall, this 17-year-old kid who just graduated high school, built a 3D semantic mapping system that turned survey responses into AI-generated round-table discussions. Sev Geraskin created an "artificially general intelligent data interface" that lets you have actual conversations with datasets… we put him in our hackathon Hall of Fame because he kept winning everything.
But Dean? Dean was different.
This guy looks like he should be running hospital analytics somewhere (which he does). Quiet, methodical, the kind of person you'd trust with your medical data. But apparently, he's been dreaming of being a musician since he was 14 years old.